then it was quiet
by Douglas Messerli
Claude
Lanzmann (director) Shoah / 1985
Given
the fact that I had devoted so many of the pages of my 2015 cultural memoirs to
the events of World War II, I thought I owed it to my readers to spend the 9 ½ hours
watching Claude Lanzmann’s memorable
documentary of the Holocaust, Shoah.
So in April of 2016 I ordered the four disks, over a period of three weeks,
watching the painful interviews with extermination camp survivors, German
perpetrators, Polish farmers, and historians with whom from the late 1970s until
the film’s premiere in 1985 the director and his translators spoke.
Shoah
is basically centered on three major Polish camps and the Warsaw Ghetto:
the extermination camps include Chełmno,
where only two men survived the mobile gas vans that killed Jews early in the
Holocaust; and the death camps of Treblinka, to a lesser degree Belzac, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In
relation to these focuses, Lanzmann talks with German guards and overseers—sometimes
secretly catching their conversations on illegal tapes—interviews a
driver/coal-stocker (there is some debate on his precise role) of the transport
train, Polish farmers working near the camps, and historian Raul Hillberg, who
nicely fills in gaps and expands on other testimonies.
The film begins with survivor Simon
Srebnik singing in a rowboat, strangely enough “recreating”—in a film primarily
determined to reject recreation—how he, as a young boy, was forced
to serenade his captors. Indeed, it may have been his singing ability, known not
only to the Nazis but to the Polish neighbors around the Chełmno camp that
permitted him to be one of only two survivors. There is something hauntingly
beautiful even about the horror of his situation, which, in fact, serves as a
sort of respite from all the terrifying descriptions that we will later face.
Yet the scenes with Srebnik bring up the problem that will become more obvious
as the documentary moves forward: is it truly ethical, as Lanzmann insists, to force
these survivors and even the German perpetrators, to relive their past experiences?
Yet for Lanzmann it is clearly a necessary act, despite whatever pain may
recur.
But already in these early moments of
the film, Lanzmann vilifies the Poles, as the railwayman Henryk Gawkowski
recounts his own experiences of helping move the Jews to the camps. The stench
of already dead corpses—those who died in the journey even before they reached
the camps—and the knowledge of what he was being forced to do (two Nazis with
machine guns stood next to him at all times), required him, so he claims, to make
many of runs intoxicated on vodka.
At one point a survivor remembers looking
through the slants of the railroad car outside of the camp where they saw
Polish farmers. When attempted to signal to them, asking what was going on, the
farmers simply slid their fingers across their necks to indicate that death
was in store; he explains, however, that they could not comprehend what the
signal meant. Later, in a kind of horrible coincidence of history, Lanzmann
speaks with some of the very same farmers who explain that they were not allowed to
even stare for any length of time at the nearby camps, admitting that they signaled
the same gesture to Jews on the railroad cars.
Franz Schalling, a German security guard,
calmly describes the workings of Chełmno, explaining (on tapes secretly recorded
in a nearby van) how the Jews, “half-frozen, starved, dirty, already half-dead”
were rushed into the gas wagons, big trucks with exhaust fumes. There was a
heavy noise of the exhaust tubes of the van, but then “it was quiet. No more
screaming.” No one leaves CheÅ‚mno alive as the trucks are moved into the woods,
where the dead were burned or buried.
Although Schalling continually bewails the situation of the “poor” Jews,
he is only too happy to sing a German marching song which he is sure Lanzmann
has never before heard.
At Treblinka, with train tracks that went
up to the gas chambers themselves, the Germans and their Ukrainian cohorts
managed to churn out daily “a mountain of corpses.” Christian Wirth describes
the Treblinka camp as being primitive, but which ultimately worked well as a
factory of death. He too describes the rushing of the prisoners, the hurried
undressing, the waiting in the cold, the Ukrainians beating the men into the
chambers before the women, and then “there was that silence.” As Hillburg
describes the minute steps of changes in the camps: “the bureaucrats become
inventors who were forced to go beyond the past” in their methods to kill
faster and faster. In 2 or 2 ½ hours after the transports appeared it was all
over.
Abraham Bomba, a barber by trade, was
gathered with other such haircutters to help calm women prisoners by pretending
to give them a haircut before the supposed “delousing.” Bomba is forced to
retell his story while cutting the hair of a friend, but finally breaks down
and finds it difficult to go on with his memories, as he recounts that another
barber friend suddenly found his wife and sister among those in the gas room antechamber.
The old, the sick, and the very young
were sent to the “infirmary,” Bomba relates. But the infirmary consisted of a
pit on the edge of which these figures were shot, their bodies falling in to be
burned. The Jews who were being used for cleanup knew that when their time
came, they would also be sent to the “infirmary."
Filip Müller, who worked incinerating
the bodies after the gassings, explains the arrangement of the 4 crematoriums
of Birkenau where 3,000 might be gassed at a single time. Again, the Jews were rushed
into the gas chambers. But Müller continues with one the most horrible images
of the entire film:
The most horrible thing was
once the chambers were
opened you saw people packed
together like basalt,
like blocks of stone that
tumbled out of the chamber.
Apparently
once inside the gas chambers the lights were turned out, and as the gas or cyanide
crystals began to pour in, people attempted to crawl up and over the others to
get away. There was a void around the spot where the crystals went in, but
elsewhere the children and elderly were at the bottom of the heap of the dead.
Some children, he reports, had had their skulls crushed.
Asked whether he told any of those was in
store form them, he answers that, no, it was impossible. One friend,
recognizing a woman from his village explained to her what was about to happen.
She became crazed, attempting to tell all the other women; but no one would
believe her. So she attempted the tell the men, who also could not believe what
she was saying. The gassing went on without her; but soon after, she and the
man who told her were thrown into the ovens alive.
Only those who’d been traveling for 10-12
days, starving, from Corfu or further away, were given something to drink
before they entered the chambers. It was part of the Nazi process.
Lanzmann goes to Corfu to hear how of the
1,650 Jews taken from the Greek island, only 132 were saved. Even the sick and
insane were rounded up. The mayor signed a document that life would be better
without the Jews. The Christians gathered to observe their early morning arrests.
“Terror is the best of guards,” the speaker perceptively comments.
Former Nazi Walter Stier, who headed the
“resettlement trains,” claimed no knowledge of the camps, despite the fact that
he surely knew why the trains were suddenly being ordered to stop at small
villages throughout Europe. But, argues Lanzmann, the Poles knew, they could
see the trains coming in full and going out empty. But Steier, it appears,
remained clueless, despite the fact, as Hillburg later explains, the trains had
to be paid by the Gestapo, each fare representing—as if the Jews represented a
tour group—1/2 of the fare per person, the whole process being taken care of as
if it were a ticketing procedure through a travel bureau. The Jews themselves,
he argues, paid for their own death from the money and possessions that had
already been stolen from them.
By 1943, it became apparent to figures
such as Richard Glazar, that”no one would help us unless we helped ourselves,"
and a group at Aushwitz-Birkenau were ready to resist. Yet the majority of
the resistance leaders were Polish political prisoners, not Jews, and were
primarily German-speaking anti-Nazi’s. Although conditions improved inside the
camp as the death trains temporarily ceased before Eichmann’s push to send the
Hungarian Jews to their death, it meant that those who had survived were even
at greater danger. “The production of death” had to continue.
Some of the most horrifying descriptions
in Lanzmann’s documentary concern the Warsaw Ghetto. If one might think of the
Ghetto, where the rebellion finally did occur, as a safer or, at least,
preferable place to the camps, one need only hear Jan Karski’s testimony.
Karski, who worked for the Polish government-in-exile, was approached by two Jews,
one from the Bunds, who insisted that he must convey to the British and
Americans what was happening in order that
their military decisions include the extinction of the Jewish population. To
help him understand what was happening in the Ghetto, they made their way
through a tunnel into the Ghetto itself.
On one side, Karski recalls, there was simply
a building where life went on in Warsaw, with shops busily going about their
everyday activities. On the other side naked bodies lined the streets, Jews
left to die there because their relatives could not pay the tax in order to
take them in or bury them. “Babies were sucking from women with no breasts.
Everybody was offering something to sell. It wasn’t humanity, but some kind of
hell.”
“There were two boys, Hitler jugend.” As they approached, everyone
quieted. One of them took up a gun and shot. There was a stench of a
suffocating bedlam.
Nazi administrator, Fran Grassler
claims he can no longer remember those days in the Ghetto, but Lanzmann reminds
him that he is mentioned in the Ghetto head Adam Czerniaków’s
daily diary several times. Czerniaków’s diary does not condemn the Germans, but recounts
numerous daily events that reveal just how horrible life was in the Warsaw
Ghetto. A woman comes to him to beg for rent money, not for food, knowing she
will soon die, but simply not wanting to die in the street. Typhus breaks out,
and everyone is being starved.
Given presidential candidate Donald Trump’s
recent mantra, I was particularly struck by Czerniaków’s anger over the fact
that not only had the Jews themselves build the wall surrounding them,
but they had to pay for it. In 1941, it
is estimated that 5,000 people died in the Ghetto each month.
When Czerniaków was told that people would
soon be shipped to the camps, including orphaned children, he committed
suicide. The Ghetto uprisings, lasting three days from April 19, 1943, ended in
most of the resister’s deaths. Karski’s attempt to change British military
movements and to “shake the conscience of the world,” failed.
Lanzmann seems to blame the anti-Semitic
Poles for the continued existence of the camps, without explaining that
extermination camps existed in several other countries and that even in France, as I have reiterated above,
there were temporary camps where hundreds of Jews were killed. Not only does he
fail to make mention of any humane activities by the Poles, of which there we, apparently many, but he seems to
ignore the fact that if Hitler had been successful in destroying the Jewish
population of Europe he might have gone on to exterminate as many as the Poles
as he could.
Yet Shoah
remains one of the most important documentaries ever made simply because
the director allowed so many voices to speak the truth, to so eloquently tell
their stories—particularly when those stories represent such unspeakable
realities.
Los Angeles,
April 29, 2016
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